Minimalist Coverage and Energy-Aware Tour Planning for a Mobile Robot
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Ghosh, Anirban; Dutta, Ayan; Sotolongo, Brian
- Source
- 2022 IEEE 18th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2022 IEEE 18th International Conference on. :2056-2061 Aug, 2022
- Subject
- Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Computer aided software engineering
Surveillance
Charging stations
Robot sensing systems
Germanium
Search problems
Path planning
- Language
- ISSN
- 2161-8089
We study a coverage and tour planning problem wherein a robot with limited sensor coverage is assigned to serve n known points in an environment. A location is served if it is within the visibility range of the robot’s sensor. However, the robot is equipped with a battery that powers the robot to travel a maximum distance of B. Several charging stations are placed in the environment so that the robot can charge itself (if needed) to complete the mission. The objective is to compute an energy-constrained tour that starts at a given start location, visits a minimum set of service locations for serving the n points of interest, and returns to the start location. We also aim to minimize the distance traveled between any two consecutive service locations in the tour via a subset of charging stations. This problem has applications in search-and-rescue and surveillance missions where such coverage and energy-aware path planning are of utmost importance. We propose a new algorithm for this problem and show its efficacy using experiments with up to 1000 points of interest on a plane. The running time of our algorithm for such a scenario was a negligible 5.33 sec.